Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“Rhi,” Hwaith said, “why not be a little more proactive? Why let Tepeyollotl and the Lone One pick the ground that suits them? Force the issue.”

She looked over at him, bemused. “How, exactly?”

He was looking at Auwfi with his whiskers forward. “Take advantage of local circumstances. Get our local long-term, allegedly fixed gate to do what it always wants to do anyway.”

Aufwi’s eyes opened, and he dropped his jaw in a big grin, and he and Hwaith said in unison, “Get uprooted and move around…”

“We’ll pull up the fixed gate and put it someplace where the ground suits us,” Hwaith said, “and then pump it so full of energy that the spell won’t have any choice but to execute there.”

“Ideally,” Arhu said, “somewhere mostly away from ehhif, so that we don’t have to worry about a lot of collateral damage.”

“Plenty of empty hillsides around here…” Hwaith said.

Rhiow put her rightside whiskers forward in ironic amusement at the sound of toms contemplating doing what they secretly loved best: destroying things with impunity. But truly it’s not a bad idea… “The concept has merit,” she said.

“Great. And then what?” Siffha’h said, and yawned.

Rhiow knew what, or rather knew what she didn’t know, and was about to speak up at last because she had no other option. But then she became aware of Urruah sitting like a statue at the edge of the reconstruction of the uptime tablets — his tail curled around his toes, his head bent down, and staying so still that Rhiow was wondering whether he had dozed off. But after a moment he spoke. “Ith,” he said. “Hheh’len. What do you make of that?”

They both looked at the spot he had been gazing, a place at the edge of the last clay-tablet fragment in one row. There was another serpent figure there, the front part of it twisted around in several tightly-coiled S shapes, and underneath it a peculiar funnel-shaped figure, with a coiled and back-flexed end. “What does that say?” Urruah said, leaning down further and staring at the characters next to the funnel shape.

Helen leaned over and studied the characters. “It’s something about how the Nine-Wind God comes to the place of the serpent rope – “

“But look at the picture,” Urruah said. “Everybody, Rhi, look at it. If you didn’t know what you were drawing – or trying to make a picture of it just from somebody’s description, maybe not a terribly good description either – doesn’t that look like a rough schematic of the throat of a worldgate? Look how it bends back there – that’s almost the Klein-bottle rationalization that we use to represent the schematic in 2D – “

“And look what’s inside the funnel,” Helen said. “Another one. A little tiny one…”

Very slowly Urruah lifted his head and looked at Rhiow.

Her eyes started to widen. And I thought I was seeing typical tommish let’s-destroy-stuff business going on before! “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “No, Urruah. No chance! If you think that just because of a little thing like the world possibly ending — ”

“It doesn’t have to end, Rhi!” Urruah said. “Look at it! A little open-throated claudication stuck into a gate’s patency locus. We know perfectly well from wizardly theory what will happen when we do this — ”

“We think we do,” Rhiow shouted at him, “because gate theory also tells us perfectly clearly why that this is something we should never ever do! If you put a working claudication through an active worldgate, the eversion reaction will rip spacetime apart on a massive scale –“

“Or when in the vicinity of an equivalent rip of roughly equal proportions, with careful management,” Urruah said, “mesh with and evert the corresponding eversion so that the two cancel each other out.”

He was looking over at Hwaith and Aufwi now. Both of them were acquiring the same look of rapidly growing and truly terrifying interest, made far worse because each of them was contemplating how wonderful it would be to have a good reason to do something that was normally a gate technician’s worst nightmare. “Urruah, you are out of your vhai’d mind!” Rhiow said. “’With careful management?’ You’re contemplating constructing a gate adjustment of this complexity and magnitude on the fly? Because there’s no way to judge the actual forces or qualities of the incursion until it happens – “

“Of course there’s a way. We already have some indicators,” Urruah said. “From the earlier gating that failed! Sure, this time the scalars will be bigger, because Ith won’t be falling into the middle of everything without warning. But we know roughly how the incursion gate will build itself.”

“So we root the pumped-up LA gate where we want it – “ Aufwi said.

Hwaith’s tail was lashing. “And we build a pocket claudication with a lot of power wound up inside it, tailored so that when it’s pushed through the LA gate, the eversion is on a close order of force to the incursion event – “

“And then when the incursion starts right in front of us, which it’ll have no choice to do, we feed the claudication into the live gate, and when the eversion starts, we push it into the incursion locus, and… blooey!”

Rhiow was trying to keep her tail from revealing her inmost thoughts. ‘Blooey.’ Sweet Iau, what am I going to do with these three?

“But Rhi, you haven’t heard the best thing about this!”

“I haven’t?”

He ignored her irony. “The other effect associated with an eversion, the other reason this is such a bad thing to do! It inflicts dimensional quantum outrage on all of hyperstring structure throughout a given physical reality, sensitizing it to such eversions so that they can never happen again. If this was just a regular gate eversion, it would make worldgating impossible right across all the universes affected. But in this case, it’s not regular gatings that would become impossible, but the kind of unnatural fusion gating that tried to happen in the cavern. Our sheaf of universes would be immunized against this kind of thing forever more!”

At first hearing the concept sounded attractive, but Rhiow was feeling more ragged by the moment and was beginning to doubt her analytical abilities. “Ruah, there’s no way the San Andreas fault could fail to trigger with the forces that would be discharged here. The earlier earthquake would be nothing to this. And I’m leaving aside the effects on the ocean and the atmosphere clear up to space – “

“Rhi, it’s true, the Earth may be seriously damaged. Even if we can minimize the worst effects, we may at the very least we may destroy the state of California, which I would regret – “

“I bet the Californians would too,” Arhu said under his breath.

“But for that price, if things go right we’ll shut down the invader’s access to our whole khiliocosm so It can never get in here again. And worst case, even if it doesn’t work, by Iau we’ll give the Great Old One Outside something to remember us by, a multidimensional abscess in its very guts that’ll never heal — and stuff a hairball into sa’Rraah’s gullet like she’s never had since Aaurh the Mighty shoved the Big Bang down her throat and made her cough it up!”

Rhiow wanted to just lie down and cover her eyes with her tail. It’s such a tom thing to say. Yet splendid in its way. The spirit of Life hooking a claw in Death’s ear– And the wizardry is solid. What can I possibly say?

Except that it’s a better idea than anything I’ve come up with.

Even though I’m still not sure it’ll work —

“Urruah, I have to think about it for a little,” Rhiow said. “And take it to the Whisperer, obviously. But whatever we wind up doing, this threat has to be resolved and destroyed in this time. Otherwise it’ll simply propagate up the timeline into our world and execute all over again, as the earlier tablets warned. And not just through time, but through all the spaces and worlds that the One from Outside is able to affect when it comes through.”

“That is plain,” Ith said. “But we must choose our course of action quickly, get behind the choice, and enact it with one heart.” He looked at Rhiow. “I am more senior than you, perhaps, by what I’ve become since we first met. But seniority is not experience. What power my presence adds to this equation is useful, but I may have done all the good I can do simply by arriving. You are the most experienced of us on site. You have to decide what to do, and lead us.”

They were all looking at her, waiting: not a one of them disagreed with what Ith said. The pressure of it all came down on Rhiow as intolerably and inescapably as the darkness had in the cavern.

“I can’t decide,” Rhiow said, distraught. “I can’t decide right now, not after what we’ve been through. I’m a wreck. I have to sleep.”

“Sleep then,” Urruah said. “So will we: we’ve had a rough night. If this follows the timing data we have so far, we’ve got at least until nightfall. But then we’ve got to move.”

Rhiow tottered off in the direction of the Silent Man’s bedroom. Behind her, she heard Ith say to the Silent Man, “By the way – I have heard that a provision of great fame can be obtained here. Do you know of a place called Langer’s?”

There was a pause. Langer’s–? Oh, wait. You mean that new little deli down by Seventh and Alvorado? Sure, I know it.

“Then since the world may be about to end, while there is still time, let us go to investigate its pastrami.”

Rhiow rolled her eyes and pushed the bedroom door shut behind her.

She was afraid that by now she might have slipped into that state where sheer exhaustion leaves you desperate for sleep yet unable to achieve it. But this turned out not to be the case. No sooner had Rhiow curled up on the windowsill in the Silent Man’s bedroom than she fell straight into slumber as dark and total as if another cavern like the one behind Dagenham’s place had fallen on her. How long this happy state lasted, she couldn’t tell: but there came a moment when she was aware of lying on the floors of dream, and Rhiow realized that she wasn’t alone.

She opened one bleary eye in the darkness. “Hwaith,” she said, “please, of all times, not now…”

I am not Hwaith, the answer came back, sounding more than usually annoyed.

Rhiow bristled as she realized Who had invaded her slumbers. Slowly she sat up, yawned, and then deliberately threw one hind leg over her back and started washing right in the face of the Lone Power, giving her privates her best attention in the best insult she could summon at short notice. “You’re going to have the hide off me soon enough,” Rhiow said between sets of strokes, not bothering to look up. “I’d think you might let me sleep one last time without ruining even what good I can still get out of that.”

Sleep is not going to be an issue for any of us soon if you don’t take advantage of the chance laid before you, sa’Rraah said.

Oh, wonderful. Yet another temptation, right here on the threshold of the end of the worlds, Rhiow thought, annoyed at the Lone One’s eternal fixity. “What is it now?” she said. “Don’t I have enough problems without You poking your nose even further into my dish? What chance are you talking about?”

You have been very forward about assuming that you know what I have in mind as regards this whole situation, sa’Rraah said.

It was most unsettling to hear her in this mode, speaking as clearly as the Whisperer normally did. But at the moment it was the Whisperer who was being more than usually silent. Everything else is so topsy-turvy right now, Rhiow thought, why should this be any different? She licked her nose. “Daughter of the Queen,” she said, trying to be polite, but unable to resist using an epithet that would remind the one on the other side of the conversation exactly where her loyalties lay, “your motives have always been the same from aeon to aeon. What wisdom would there be in assuming you’d suddenly gone all distracted, like some kitten chasing a leaf in the wind, and had started doing good?”